Backup with Dropbox
April 01, 2011 (updated 4 years ago) by Chemtable Software
Internet is full of various cloud services that allows their users to store any information on their servers. This is convenient to store backups. First, archives on the remote server do not depend on the health of your hard drive. And they are always available, from any place in the world. So this article shows how to create automatic backups using any archiver, Windows Scheduler and one of such cloude services – Dropbox.
Let’s first investigate the place where our files will be stored. Upon the first visit, the Dropbox website suggests to download and install a special tool. You shouldn’t decline the proposal as this tool makes the work with the service clear and easy. The setup process run s as usual, a user simply needs to click Install. But then the tool asks to select a Dropbox account. Since we do not have one yet, we should select the “I don’t have a Dropbox account” option.
Type our data on the next screen.
Select a free account. There are 2GB available on the server for a free account.
Finally, select Typical, because we don’t need any special settings.
When the setup completes, a special Dropbox subfolder is created in Windows user folders. To quickly access it, there is also a link to it in Favorites. When you save the information to this special folder, it is automatically uploaded to the remote server. So, all you need to do is to setup automatic creating and copying of backup archives.
We have already described how to create such system. So we simply take the shortcut we already have and make some changes into it. First, we’ll change the destination place: change G:\backup to C:\Users\User\Dropbox. Then you need to setup a password to limit the access to the archives. This is strongly recommended, because Internet is not safe place after all, and transferring data to it is potentially dangerous operation. So add the following text to the parameters: -p***** (where asterisks indicates your actual password). So finally you should receive the following parameter line: “a –p***** -agYYYY-MMM-DD C:\Users\User\backup @C:\list.txt”.
Leave all the rest without changes. Windows Scheduler will run this shortcut with the specified period. The archiver will create archives in the background mode and put them to the Dropbox folder. And finally, Dropbox will automatically upload them to the remote server.
